The latest Nobel prize for economics will be announced Monday, and even insiders aren't putting odds on who will win it.

“Not a clue, not even a rumor,” said 2001 laureate professor Michael Spence.

“Because so many people qualify, predictions are useless,” added Eugene Fama, who won in 2013.

Staff at New York University certainly got tongues wagging Thursday morning, when they accidentally left online an announcement that the economist Paul Romer—also the World Bank’s new chief economist—had won. But they, and Mr. Romer himself, quickly poured cold water on the suggestion that the pioneer of endogenous growth theory had won.

“It is the type of mistake that could have been made in any of the last 20 years,” Mr. Romer wrote on his blog, putting it down to the the routine zealous contingency planning of his university’s PR department.

Moreover, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which whittles a long list of hundreds of candidates down to as many as three winners every year, awarded the prize to another growth economist of sorts last year, Angus Deaton, extolling his contributions to understanding consumption, welfare and poverty.

Former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund,Oliver Blanchard, now at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is a likelier pick this year, at least according to an online “People’s choice” poll of experts conducted by Thomson Reuters.

The Bank of Sweden Prize in Economics Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, as it's more formally known, emerged in 1969 when the bank celebrated its 300th birthday with a donation to the Nobel foundation. Since then 76 people—including one woman, Elinor Ostrom, in 2009—have won, including Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek and Paul Samuelson.

The academy always has the option of singling out brilliance and making a political statement. Awarding the prize to eminent trade economist and free-trade advocate Jagdish Bhagwati, of Columbia University—at 82, long considered a candidate—would draw attention to the benefits of free trade, under sustained attack throughout Europe and the U.S. For similar reasons, the academy might choose William Nordhaus of Yale University, perhaps the foremost economic modeler of the impact of climate change.

Awarding the Nobel to Anthony Atkinson of Nuffield College, Oxford, would draw attention to rising inequality, which is fueling political discontent. Mr. Atkinson’s theoretical and empirical contributions to taxation theory and inequality over many decades have inspired many younger economists, including Thomas Piketty of "Capital in the Twenty-First Century" fame.

Across the Atlantic, Harvard University's Martin Feldstein, who advised President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, has long been considered a potential winner, with contributions to taxation and pensions policy standing out among his more than 380 peer-reviewed journal articles from 1963 onward. Robert Barro, also at Harvard, who asked the increasingly apposite question “are government bonds net wealth?” in 1974, is also yet to be honored.

The slowdown in productivity growth throughout the world has increasingly worried policy makers. William Baumol, aged 94, with more than 40 books under his belt, has provided clues to understanding it, with his "cost disease" positing the productivity of services is inherently limited compared with manufacturing. Dale Jorgenson from Harvard University has also made profound contributions to understanding the contributions of labor, capital and technology to economic growth.

Douglas Diamond at the University of Chicago is at the top of New York University finance professor Viral Acharya’s list. “His seminal work has provided the micro-foundation for banking and intermediation theory centered around the provision of liquidity to the economy,” Mr. Acharya said.

John Cochrane at the Hoover Institution said singling out individuals was problematic. "Science doesn't really follow the Nobel model of the lone genius, Einstein the patent office; it's much more of a group effort," he told The Wall Street Journal.

There is little guarantee the academy will choose a winner whose specialty is topical, though. Economics, Alfred Marshall famously wrote in 1890, is the study of people “as they live and move and think in the ordinary business of life.” The late economist George Stigler, a Nobel recipient in 1982, dubbed economics the “imperial science.”

Indeed, prizes have spanned the business cycle, macroeconomic management, statistical methods, financial services, and even behavioral psychology and social behavior. Perhaps it is surprising, then, that U.S. Judge Richard Posner’s highly influential melding of law and economics has not yet been recognized.

Corrections & Amplifications

Eugene Fama won the economics Nobel in 2013. An earlier version of this article gave the wrong year. (Oct. 7, 2016)